Casebook

By Mona Simpson

Mothers, it is sometimes said, are only as happy as their least happy child. Could it also be that children are only as happy as their moms? That's one of the many questions Mona Simpson explores in "Casebook," her beguiling sixth novel.

Beginning with her auspicious 1986 debut, "Anywhere But Here," Simpson's big subject has been how the vicissitudes of parents' lives and loves affect their children. Unstable mothers, absent fathers, financial pressures, failed romances - they all reverberate. "Casebook" is the engaging record of a sensitive adolescent boy's response to the fallout from his parents' divorce and to his and his mother's dashed romantic hopes.

Growing up in the first decade of the 21st century in Santa Monica, Simpson's narrator, the appealingly earnest Miles Adler-Hart, is a spy in the house of love. He rouses readers' radar with his opening lines: "I was a snoop, but a peculiar kind. I only discovered what I most didn't want to know." Hiding under beds and behind sofas, listening in on phone conversations and kitchen confidentials, this Harry-the-Spy often overhears what he is not yet capable of fully understanding. His cluelessness is alternately hilarious and poignant. He says the mystifying words "pressed on me, like sharp cookie cutters."

Miles lives with his mother, Irene Adler, a UCLA math professor, whom he describes as "nice enough looking, for a smart woman," and his younger twin sisters, whom he calls Boop One and Boop Two. When his ironic, detached father moved out a month after 9/11, "it was the worst thing that ever happened to me, after the Boops being born. Even with all my sleuthing, I'd never suspected this."

His parents weren't romantic, he says, and their divorce is relatively amiable. But Miles feels the diminution shared by so many children of fractured homes: "We had what we'd had before, but less of it. ... Our family couldn't reassemble; even I understood that whatever held people together was fragile and, once broken, couldn't be put together again. But we weren't yet something else."

His mother, Miles comments early on, "saw love as a trap to catch females." And, on one level, "Casebook" is a case in point: the closely observed story of "the Mim's" six-year ensnarement by a companionable, animal-loving "dork" named Eli who - as Miles and his best friend Hector discover through their relentless detective work - turns out to be a "con artist of love."

Written from the perspective of a young adult who essentially wiretapped his boyhood, "Casebook" captures Miles' plangent passage to maturity with a convincing immediacy. Simpson also channels a deep-seated resistance to change that is common among so many children: "I wanted things to stay the way they were. Separation had made me conservative," Miles comments, while one of his sister's wails, "What's the point of love if it's going to end!"

Miles' struggles to make sense of the baffling nature of romantic love and its connection with happiness likewise ring true, as he wonders whether hope for happiness is the same as happiness, and about his own sexuality, given that his strongest feelings are for his best friend, fellow sleuth and literary collaborator Hector. He asks, "What was so-called romance? It seemed a lot like friendship, but with a fleck of sparkle."

Simpson's prose is supple and frequently lovely, hitting just the right notes of charm, humor, satire, sincerity and darker foreshadowing. Recalling a shopping excursion in Pasadena with the unreliable Eli less than a quarter of the way through the book, Miles writes: "My mother never seemed happier than on that day, eating chocolate pudding in the cold. She shivered and smiled. A mother's happiness: something you recognize and then forget; it didn't seem to matter much at the time, though it spread through our bodies. How did I know a moment like that was something I'd collect and later touch for consolation?"

Despite a madcap plot of revenge involving incorrigibly nasty pets, the novel slumps slightly in the middle, as readers are bound to lose patience with "the Mim's" exasperating relationship with Eli - and Miles' obsession with it - long before they do. But hang in there: Simpson's final chapters pull the whole book together beautifully and bring it to a perfectly wrought, powerfully moving climax. In the end, "Casebook" is about a mother's legacy to her son - important life lessons, well learned.